June Raises $20 Million to Help Enterprises Deploy AI Without Extra Engineers

Enterprise software companies have rushed to build artificial intelligence tools over the past two years. Still, many large organisations continue to struggle with one of the biggest hurdles: deploying those systems across complex, decades-old business infrastructure. A new startup called June believes AI itself can solve that implementation challenge, and investors appear to agree.

June emerged from stealth on Monday after raising $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures. The round also attracted backing from several prominent technology executives, including Michael Dell, Aaron Levie and George Kurtz. The company declined to disclose its valuation.

Chief Executive Officer Efrat Rapoport, a former Salesforce executive, said the rapid adoption of AI has unexpectedly increased demand for professional services instead of reducing it. Rather than simplifying deployments, many organisations have relied on growing teams of forward-deployed engineers, or FDEs, who work directly with customers to implement AI systems inside enterprise environments.

“AI, paradoxically, increases the demand for professional services,” Rapoport said, arguing that the industry’s response has largely been to add more implementation specialists.

Built by former Salesforce AI leaders

Rapoport founded June alongside Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein and Idan Tsitiat. The four entrepreneurs previously created Bonobo AI, a company focused on language models before the rise of transformer-based AI. Bonobo launched a voice-to-text service in 2017 before being acquired by Salesforce in 2019.

After joining Salesforce, the founders spent several years working on the company’s AI initiatives. According to Rapoport, they repeatedly saw enterprise customers struggle to integrate AI with existing business platforms despite enthusiasm for the technology.

She said investor confidence in the team’s experience was so strong that June completed its funding round without preparing a traditional presentation deck.

Addressing enterprise complexity

Although generative AI has sparked concerns that software companies could eventually be replaced, Rapoport said large enterprises still depend on established platforms such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Databricks and Workday. Successfully deploying AI requires those systems to work together despite fragmented data, duplicate records and years of accumulated technical debt.

According to Rapoport, creating an AI agent template is relatively straightforward. The greater challenge is enabling that agent to operate correctly across inconsistent databases, overlapping workflows and disconnected enterprise applications.

June’s platform scans an organisation’s existing software environment to understand business processes, identify bottlenecks and recommend improvements. It then generates a step-by-step implementation roadmap, instructing customers which duplicate records to remove, which data sources to connect and which tasks should be completed before deploying AI agents. Users can then instruct the platform to build those changes directly inside their organisations.

Customer experience highlights deployment challenges.

Paul Akinmade, chief strategy officer at U.S. mortgage lender CMG, said his company adopted Claude Code for software engineering but encountered significant obstacles when integrating it with Salesforce. His team spent weeks consulting architects and forward-deployed engineers without finding a workable solution.

Akinmade said June quickly provided visibility into where AI agents could be deployed safely and enabled implementation before the companies had even completed their official kickoff meeting. He added that he specifically wanted a product that customers could operate independently rather than one requiring dedicated implementation engineers.

Rapoport said June is designed to complement consultants and FDEs, although some customers may ultimately adopt the platform to reduce their reliance on those specialised services.